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Canned Peaches
Wipe peaches and put in boiling water, allowing them to stand just long enough to easily loosen skins. Remove skins and cook fruit at once, that it may not discolor, following Directions for Canning. Some prefer to pare peaches, sprinkle with sugar, and let stand over night. In morning drain, add water to fruit syrup, bring to boiling-point, and then cook fruit. Peaches may be cut in halves, or smaller pieces if desired.
This entry is a fragment of a larger method: it hands the actual preserving off to the book's general "Directions for Canning," which describe the open-kettle approach standard in 1896 and abandoned since. The notes below explain the fruit handling and why the sealing procedure is the part that fails.
- Why it should not be canned this wayThe method behind this entry is open-kettle canning: hot fruit is ladled into jars and sealed with no timed processing of the filled, closed jar. Nothing after filling brings the jar contents and the sealing surface to a controlled temperature for a measured period, so mold, yeasts and heat-resistant spoilage organisms survive in the headspace and at the rim. This entry itself gives no headspace figure, no processing time and no altitude allowance; the general directions it defers to are not reproduced here.
- Peaches are not as acidic as they wereVariety matters -- Low-acid white-flesh peaches and nectarines are not recommended for boiling-water canning, because no tested procedure exists for them; ordinary yellow peaches sit on the acid side of pH 4.6 and are processed without added acid. This recipe names no variety.
- Use a current tested procedure insteadIf you want to put up peaches, follow a present-day tested recipe with stated headspace, acidification and boiling-water processing times. The fruit preparation described here — the blanch, the overnight sugaring — is sound; the preserving half of the method is not, and should not be reconstructed from it.
- The blanch"Boiling water, allowing them to stand just long enough to easily loosen skins" is usually 30 to 60 seconds for a ripe peach. A plunge into cold water afterwards stops the flesh cooking and helps the skins slip in one piece; the recipe does not mention it.
- Why the haste"Cook fruit at once, that it may not discolor" is enzymatic browning, the same reaction as in a cut apple. Peeled peaches held in air darken within minutes; an acidulated holding water is the usual modern answer, and the recipe's urgency is well founded.
- The overnight sugaringThe second method draws juice out of the fruit by osmosis, giving a peach-flavoured syrup rather than plain sugar water. Roughly a quarter to a third of the fruit's weight in sugar is the traditional proportion; the recipe gives no figure, so this is an estimate rather than a conversion.
- YieldNo quantity is given anywhere. As a rule of thumb, a 20 lb lug of peaches fills about seven or eight quart jars, and 2 to 3 lb of fruit fills one quart.
This entry comes from the canning chapter of Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, published in 1896, at the height of American household preserving. The threaded jar neck and screw cap patented by John Landis Mason in 1858 had by then made summer fruit a year-round pantry item for ordinary families, and cookbooks of the period devoted long chapters to the practice, usually with one set of general directions followed by short per-fruit notes like this one. Farmer's era relied on visible signs boiling point, a good seal, sugar as a preservative rather than on measured processing times, which entered household practice only after the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state agricultural extension services began issuing tested canning schedules in the 1910s and 1920s. Peaches were among the most-canned fruits in the country, and the choice she offers between blanched-and-peeled and pared-and-sugared may reflect differing household tastes: one gives firm fruit in light syrup, the other a softer peach in its own drawn juice.